Topic: Bitcoin's earliest developers (Read 666 times)

According to Wiki, On 18 August 2008, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered. Later that year on 31 October, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list.  This paper detailed methods of using a peer-to-peer network to generate what was described as "a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust".In January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with the release of the first open source bitcoin client and the issuance of the first bitcoins, with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the first block of bitcoins ever (known as the genesis block), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins. Embedded in the coinbase of this block was the text:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

This note has been interpreted as both a timestamp of the genesis date and a derisive comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.

One of the first supporters, adopters, contributor to bitcoin and receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was programmer Hal Finney. Finney downloaded the bitcoin software the day it was released, and received 10 bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world's first bitcoin transaction. Other early supporters were Wei Dai, creator of bitcoin predecessor b-money, and Nick Szabo, creator of bitcoin predecessor bit gold.

First or second year early...

How early?

It seems he is just a bit gullible. Being a good coder does not mean being resistant to con artists.

Wich of the early devs are still active on bitcoin development?

Some speculation about Gavin Andresen, sorry for being off-topic.

What happened to him and why is he trying to tell everyone that Craig Wright is the "real" Satoshi? It is almost like he's trying to defame himself.

Maybe it has something to do with his visit to the CIA headquarters? What did he share from the meeting?

Plus what of the stories that Satoshi went offline forever after Gavin went to the CIA?

Gavin is not stupid but some of his actions have become bizarre from what I read.

No, that's not meant as a forum board but rather providing a question that people are going to ask and then answering it. The source code as not used to ask questions like that. If you look carefully, you'll see that both the question and answer were written by the same person (satoshi) in the same commit.

It's pretty funny, but the earliest developers of Bitcoin used the source code of the application as a forum board. They commented some lines of code, for example: "Why Base58 is used instead of standard Base64?" Then they gave an answer commenting code again.

Interesting, could you send me any details, would love to hear!

Hmmm, invalid supposition is invalid. Amended my post.


Can a mod give buwaytress his merit back? Turns out I shouldn't have been given it.

I'm pretty sure that sipa was only added to that list so that he could help migrate/maintain the bitcoin-dev mailing list. Development had moved from sourceforge to github in 2010 before the sourceforge repo was abandoned.

IIRC all of Wladimir, Pieter, Greg, Gavin, Jeff, and Matt all got involved within months of each other in 2010-2011. I think Wladimir is actually the longest contributing active contributor.

The person who contributed the longest and is still somewhat active is actually Dooglus.

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A good place to find this kind of history is to scroll through the git log in reverse (i.e. earliest commit first).

Thanks! You're the second person I've seen trying to write about those whose names have fallen off the grid (I assume correctly?). As I mentioned, at least one of the devs of Skyledger is claimed to be one of the early developers - all the Googling I've found points only to one recent video interview that suggests a bit of deep knowledge but nothing that couldn't be gleaned off just following discussions. I've also been following the trails of some others, all cypherpunks of some water, only for interest but I can't help but wonder if any were involved in launching the Bitcoin experiment.


Already done many years ago when it was quite fashionable for journalists to try their investigative skills and claim the find for themselves. Satoshi's writing was quite consistent, and it is likely the inconsistencies were deliberate obfuscation. One of the most compelling results led to a patent application for encryption, but the three who submitted all denied links (Neal King, Charles Bry, Vladimir Oksman) and even had no knowledge of Bitcoin (so weren't that connected to cypherpunk communities?). So false positives?

Sipa is the only person still working on Bitcoin on that list, and is therefore the longest serving programmer in Bitcoin development. So Sipa has probably contributed to Bitcoin development more than anyone else.

Scratch that, apparently Sipa was not part of the deprecated sourceforge repo that Satoshi set up, or at least he was only part of the effort to move the sourceforge repo over to github in 2010.

My 2 cents,
Did anyone ever tried to compile all Satoshi's post and run a syntaxic analyse on internet? I know that some software are capable to find who wrote what, just by comparing the style, sentences etc..
It would be very surprising that he never wrote elsewhere and without leaving some hint about his identity..
Stupid?

As far as I know the earliest versions of Bitcoin were published on SourceForge, not on Github:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/

Brought to you by: gavinandresen, jgarzik, sipa

As of 2015-06-05, this project can be found here:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/

I've read all the books. I'm sort of seeing whether a post like this catches the eye of someone who says, nobody ever talks about so and so.

I'm writing a history of Bitcoin so just seeing if I'm missing anyone.

Amir created BIPs and libbitcoin

Excellent, thanks.

Thanks, I'm looking specifically for those who were involved in 2009, who may not be listed any more.